Collected Poems
Li Bai is the most beloved poet of the Chinese tradition, possibly of world literature. Spontaneous, dazzlingly imagistic, drunken with moonlight and friendship and the road, his poems of wine, exile, and mountains feel simultaneously intimate and cosmic. "Quiet Night Thoughts," four lines about moonlight and homesickness, has been memorized by Chinese schoolchildren for 1,300 years.
Hinton's translation is the one that splits readers hardest. Fans of plainer prose say it's “all translated in a terse, elliptical, sentence-fragment way,” “stingy with verbs and connecting words like articles and prepositions.” The Hinton edition also prints no Chinese text and annotates only about a quarter of the poems, leaving the rest to guesswork. Heavily annotated editions swing the opposite direction: readers of Seaton's collection warn there are “more footnotes than there are lines of poetry,” and one flatly advises, “Don't let this one be your first Li Po collection.” A few readers also tire of the thematic narrowness, poem after poem centered on wine, once read start to finish.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
